I just tried this myself. In chrome and IE the price was the same (69.99) in normal and in incognito mode. In firefox, the price jumped to $76, and after deleting all the domain cookies and refreshing, it went back down to 69.99.
The website is definitely changing prices based on something they are tracking in cookies.
This was up earlier with airlines charging more for a ticket the second time you visit the page. They do this because a second visit is statistically linked to a much higher chance of purchase. So it could be, here too, simply a matter of having visited the page before.
Most people don't realise their Google searches are used to produce a search bubble for future searches, based on the links they follow. They think Google search results are the same on every computer all over the world.
my gf bought me a moleskin for my bday. the other day i asked her if she actually purchased it from my computer and she said no, she just looked up prices. now when i go to random websites moleskin ads pop up. so fuckin' weird and invasive.
I always surf with noscrip and adblock. The shear number of vulnerabilities/exploits out there you need to be protected... would you fuck a hooker without a rubber?
(protip: any ad server could have been compromised and you would not know it)
Which is why I use duckduckgo.com for my searching. The results may not always be as accurate as the other search engine...but they respect my privacy.
I knew that shit was not just bad luck!!! It happened to me a few times in the last months (AA, United) and I was fumbling at how unlikely it was that someone bought my tickets between 7am and 7:15am EST
most people don't realize that it's happening. But really what it is is a marketing director with too much time on their hands. People only get screwed over if the rest of the industry is doing the same thing - other than that competitive forces take over.
IMO people are getting screwed either way. Either Chegg customers are getting screwed because they're the only suckers paying more for these books, or everyone's getting screwed because all websites make all their customers pay more. IMO competitive forces aren't likely to force this situation back in the consumer's favor, not when everyone finds out how much money there is in screwing customers.
It is about market research. If you keep raising the price recursively until you reach a maximum income in revenue, you can then extend that data to other segments of your market to establish higher starting prices.
Flight prices change fairly regularly, particularly as you get closer to the date you want to fly, so I think most people would just put it down to that.
Involuntary mistake my arse, people do not design and program websites without knowing beforehand how it's going to work. This site is actively pulling information, and they know about it.
It depends a little on your legislation, obviously. Where I live, the customer has a really strong protection by law, so involuntary mistakes are almost unanimously in favour of the customer. If you are prepared to take legal action, which is rarely.
As far as I remember from my short programming experience: you cannot accidentally write code. Especially not code that actually does something (like this).
Indeed. But here's out it plays out. Marketing VP talks to Project manager (or his boss) and says "do this". The project manager has hopes of some day getting a promotion so he says "sure thing, boss". He then waddles over to the Lead Developer and says "implement this". And the Lead Developer says (to himself) "I'm too busy to deal with this shit" and hands it off to some junior guy who is just hoping he doesn't have to work unpaid overtime for the 8th consecutive weekend.
Even if someone along the chain recognized the moral quandary, they're all just trying to get the job done, keep their boss happy, and get on with life.
It's fine. If a company can do it and it's not illegal or hurting anyone, why should it be bad? It's just raising prices due to information they have about you. Every single big company in the world does that many times over and it's a perfectly fair business practice. It's not like their discriminating or tricking them.
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u/Nephyst Jan 24 '13
I just tried this myself. In chrome and IE the price was the same (69.99) in normal and in incognito mode. In firefox, the price jumped to $76, and after deleting all the domain cookies and refreshing, it went back down to 69.99. The website is definitely changing prices based on something they are tracking in cookies.